RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same data is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info 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. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working 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 as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unpredicted hardware failure.