Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives will be identical all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The hard drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All of the content that you add to the cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service disruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server work with quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate 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 guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.