RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.
RAID in VPS Hosting
The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unpredicted hardware failure.