RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of security for your information along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info that is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use ordinary hard drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.