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 one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the websites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server employ quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you pick our backup service, your information will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of disk drives.