RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same data is stored on all of the drives and the key advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your info together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.