Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just one single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The disk drives that we use for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working because 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 the fact that even in case a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disks which work in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.