RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function 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 data kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server use high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.