Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
The hard drives which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one of them will be employed 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 stops working, it will be replaced without service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ quick SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The disk drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, your information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.