RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all drives and the main benefit of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort 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 information saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data that is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content at all times. With this setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.