RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same info is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the data which is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the information cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard disk drives which also work in RAID since we would like to make sure that any sort of content you add will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.