Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all function as one single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives is identical all of the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.
RAID in Shared Web Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in VPS Servers
If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard drives which operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.