RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written 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 fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on quick SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives which are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on such a hard drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your Internet sites in any respect. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with quick SSD drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the site content without loss if a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be kept 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 ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.