RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your info together with the top-notch 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 data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the Internet sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use conventional hard disks which function in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.