RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed 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, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt 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 elements of each file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.