RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same information is stored on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the information which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server work with fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine that 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 website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.