Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all drives is identical all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored 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 functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS
If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside 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 duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ regular hard disks which work in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.