RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
The disk drives which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is kept 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 restore the site content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.