Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Hosting
The hard drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to the hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server employ extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your data will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this type of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.