RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives concurrently, whether 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 fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, your info will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.