RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is cloned with an additional 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 problematic one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to verify 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 along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the data which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant 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 our company provides 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 included in the info copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least one other hard drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be stored on standard disk drives which also work in RAID because we would like to make sure that any type of website content you add will be risk-free all the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.