RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the 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 these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are generated uses quick SSD drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server use quick SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The hard drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the information will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this type of setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.