RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disk drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.