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 several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the information which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in case a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the info will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this type of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.