RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, whether 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 exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The hard drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you upload to your shared hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service disruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions 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 warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers that use SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be saved on standard disk drives which also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any sort of website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.