Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives will be identical all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Web Hosting
The hard disks that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to your web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without any service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard disk drives which also function in RAID as we want to make sure that any sort of site content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.