Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be held on fast 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 security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the needed info is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of sudden hardware failure.