RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same information is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data 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 operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using 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 will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with extremely fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.