RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical info is kept on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is 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 different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your site 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.