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 HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you choose our backup service, the data will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.