RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs fast SSD drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your websites in any way. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by 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 which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.