RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses 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 takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are created on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be saved on standard hard disks which also function in RAID as we want to make certain that any sort of site content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.