RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs quick SSD drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disk drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, 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 a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your data in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in VPS Servers
All VPS server accounts that our company offers are made on physical servers that use SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the information copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online since all the information will still load from at least one more drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any sort of website content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.