Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives will be the same at all times, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Web Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them 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 info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware malfunction.