RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data 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 if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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 fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to the web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

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

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also employ conventional hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.