RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all 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 particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.
RAID in Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers which use SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least one more disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be stored on standard hard drives that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any kind of website content you upload will be risk-free all the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.