Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives is identical all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to your shared website hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least one will 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 working, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt 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 together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to worry about losing any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work 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 drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with extremely fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on an individual 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 ensure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.