RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data 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. All of these factors suggest that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The disk drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you upload to the shared hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to worry about losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The SSD drives that are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a disk drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't have an effect on the adequate operation of your Internet sites at all. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with extremely fast SSD drives that will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, your info will be stored on an independent 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 content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.