Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Cloud Web Hosting
All of the content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.
RAID in VPS Web Hosting
In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be stored on SSD drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use conventional hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.