RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disks which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.
RAID in Website Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is cloned to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working since 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 the event that a hard drive fails, the system could switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.