Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just one single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to the shared hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without any service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server employ extremely fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.