Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives will be the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The SSD drives that are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be copied on the latter will be a mix 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 will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive won't affect the normal operation of your websites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with high-speed SSD drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, your info will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this type of setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.