RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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, etcetera. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data that is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could 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 special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the information cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least one other disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID as we want to make sure that any kind of website content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.