RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the 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, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the information that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of sudden hardware malfunction.