RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed 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. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called 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 special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee 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
The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the right information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unexpected hardware failure.