Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives at the same time. 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 the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives shall be identical all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your information in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives that are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the problematic drive won't impact the normal operation of your websites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID stops functioning, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ regular hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.