RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if 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, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Website Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with fast SSD drives that will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your data will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.