RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created 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 kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops working, the system could switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the information cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will stay online since all the information will still load from at least one other hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard drives which also work in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of website content you add will be protected all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.