RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site 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 saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives that are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on this type of a disk drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the normal operation of your sites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server use extremely fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your data will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.