RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled 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, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your shared website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use regular hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.