RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
All content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The SSD drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not impact 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 cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with super fast SSD drives that will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.