RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks that function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is saved on all the drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive fails, the system can switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unexpected hardware malfunction.