RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if 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, and many others. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.
RAID in Cloud Hosting
The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting
accounts are generated uses super fast SSD drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your info along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.
RAID in VPS Servers
The physical servers where we generate VPS server
work with fast SSD drives that will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.