RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed 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, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives that are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your Internet sites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites substantially. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.