Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives is exactly the same at all times, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Web Hosting
Any content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed data is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of sudden hardware failure.