Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as one single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made uses quick NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disk drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of security for your information in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss if a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, your info will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.