Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where info is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The disk drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company offers are made on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least one more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard drives which also work in RAID since we would like to make sure that any sort of website content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.