RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the info duplicated on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will remain online since all the info will still load from at least one more hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID since we want to make sure that any website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.