RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the information which is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk from the RAID stops working, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ standard hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.