Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all function as one single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Web Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your info will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.