Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The disk drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will 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 data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without 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 that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, the data will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no 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 configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.