RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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 could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data that will be cloned 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 done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the information cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online as all the data will still load from at least one more disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be saved on standard hard drives that also work in RAID since we want to make certain that any website content you add will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.