Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is 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 of the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Hosting
The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using 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 have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online as all the data will still load from at least one other drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives that also function in RAID since we would like to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.