RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on what 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, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this particular disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online as all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be saved on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any kind of site 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 Internet hosting service.