RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the data that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other 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 will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be stored on SSD drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ regular hard drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.