RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on quick SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts that we offer are generated on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the info duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online as all the data will still load from at least one other hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be saved on standard hard disks which also function in RAID as we would like to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.