RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if 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, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The hard disks which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you upload to the cloud website hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances 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 which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least one other hard drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard drives that also work in RAID because we would like to make certain that any type of site content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.