RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances 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 which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct data is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.