RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created 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 copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the normal operation of your websites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.