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 employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the information duplicated on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least one more hard drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be kept on standard hard disks which also work in RAID since we want to make sure that any site content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.