RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all of the drives and the main benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based 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 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 could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the info will be recovered 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 in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall 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 data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without 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 warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unexpected hardware malfunction.