RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.
RAID in Hosting
The advanced cloud hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made uses super fast SSD drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated 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 information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall 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. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any 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 that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that we provide are made on physical servers that use SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be kept on standard hard disks which also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any site content you add will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.