RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the 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 vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data 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 as soon as we replace the bad one, the data that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ 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 used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that 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 data cloned on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will remain online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be saved on standard hard disks which also work in RAID because we would like to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.