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 multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet 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 Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.