Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where data is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether data 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 Cloud Website Hosting
The drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you upload to the cloud website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ super fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The drives work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the site content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.