RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware malfunction.