RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ many 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 identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, 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, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions 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 shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use extremely fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you choose our backup service, your data will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.