RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disk drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into individual ones using virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data 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 fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Hosting
All content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website 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 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's 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 duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ ordinary hard drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.