RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks that work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is saved on all the drives and the basic advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your info along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the data that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ regular hard drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.