RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, 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 particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unforeseen hardware failure.