RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical info is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied 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 whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your information together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
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 - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out 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 new drive is added, the information that will be copied on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that we offer are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the information copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will stay online since all the info will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be saved on standard hard drives that also function in RAID as we would like to make certain that any sort of website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.