RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use ordinary hard drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.