RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the information which is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity 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 inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disks which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.