RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disks work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are created on physical servers which employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be saved on standard hard disks which also work in RAID since we would like to make certain that any sort of content you add will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.