RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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 error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server employ quick SSD drives which will boost the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, your info will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.