RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The disk drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to the shared website 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 stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with high-speed SSD drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, the info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.