Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple 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 disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.