Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives 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’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where your information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the particular setup - whether info 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, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The hard disks which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to worry about losing any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server use fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.