Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.
RAID in Cloud Website Hosting
The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are made employs fast SSD drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we create VPS server use extremely fast SSD drives that will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.