Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be the same at all times, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The NVMe drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on such a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your websites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our advanced cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online as all the info will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be stored on standard disk drives that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any sort of site content you upload will be safe and sound all of the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.