Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation 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 one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The SSD drives that are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data copied on such a disk drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive will not have an effect on the proper operation of your sites at all. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we create virtual private server use extremely fast SSD drives that will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, the information will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.