RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt 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 to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way 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 use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard drives that also operate in RAID since we want to make certain that any site content you upload will be protected at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.