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, however what is common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive won't have an effect on the normal operation of your sites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers identified as checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
If you employ one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use ordinary hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.