Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your shared website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt 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 ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is replaced and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the right data is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware failure.