RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same data is kept on all drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive fails, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server use extremely fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the website content without any loss if a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.