RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is saved on all drives and the basic benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unforeseen hardware malfunction.