RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet 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 works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not affect the proper operation of your websites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least one more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be kept on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID as we would like to make sure that any kind of website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.