RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same info is kept on all drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Web Hosting
The drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to the web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive fails, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without loss in case a main drive breaks down. In case you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.