RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the website content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.