Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
If you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use regular hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.