RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in 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 web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of sudden hardware malfunction.