RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disks which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical info is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored 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 efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the data which 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. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unexpected hardware failure.