Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved 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 in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites substantially. The hard drives function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.