RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info which is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's 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 the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.