RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to the cloud website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server use high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different 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 website content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you choose our backup service, your information will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.