Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The NVMe drives which are used for holding any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on such a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive won't impact the normal operation of your websites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The disk drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the website content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, your data will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this particular setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.