RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical info is kept on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company provides are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the correct info is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will remain online because all the info will still load from at least one more drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be saved on standard hard disks which also work in RAID because we want to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be protected all the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.