RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is kept on all drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Web Hosting
The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your info along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive fails, the system could switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server use quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.