RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind 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 specific drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this particular setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.