Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives is the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Web Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud 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 one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the data that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unexpected hardware malfunction.