RAID, which is an acronym of 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. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, 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 fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard disks function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.