Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all work as one single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives is identical all the time, 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 general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept 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 functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you choose our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.