Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives is the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The hard disks that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the cloud web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to worry about losing any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
The SSD drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is changed and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the required info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unpredicted hardware failure.