RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is stored on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's 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 fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created 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 information kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the data that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, the information will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this type of setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.