RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the info that is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.