Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives is the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The drives which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about the loss of 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 referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we provide are created on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the data copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least one more hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be stored on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make certain that any kind of site content you add will be safe and sound all the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.