RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical information is kept on all of the drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard 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 various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses 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 duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unforeseen hardware failure.