RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you use one of our VPS server packages, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.