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 many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is replaced and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required data is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unpredicted hardware failure.