Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some 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 could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server use quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and 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 type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.