Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives shall be the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs fast SSD drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done 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 using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Hosting
All virtual private server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers which take advantage of SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the data duplicated on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least one other hard disk. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be saved on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any type of content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.