Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives will be identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use standard hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.