Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where data is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all the drives will be identical all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Website Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online since all the information will still load from at least one more disk drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any type of content you upload will be safe and sound all of the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.