RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks that work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same info is stored on all the drives and the key benefit of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.
RAID in Web Hosting
The disk drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to the web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers which take advantage of SSD drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the data cloned on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be kept on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we want to make certain that any kind of site content you add will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.