RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all 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, etc. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the info that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS
In case you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.