RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows 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 data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.