Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives will be the same at all times, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use many different 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, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.