RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, the very same info is stored on all drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other 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 some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your info together with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disturbances 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 as a way to authenticate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.