RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In either case, the same info is stored on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives which are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive won't impact the proper operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers identified as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the info. 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 stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use standard hard drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.