RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data that will be copied on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the info which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.