RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same information is saved on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are created on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the information copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be stored on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID as we would like to make sure that any sort of site content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.