RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disks which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same data is kept on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the 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 error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Hosting
In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk from the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.