RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same data is stored on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be copied on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we make VPS server work with fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, your data will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.