RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. In either case, the same information is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee 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 info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you use one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use conventional hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.