RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the data which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data copied on such a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive will not have an impact on the normal operation of your websites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.