RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware failure.