Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware malfunction.