RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the information which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online because all the info will still load from at least one more drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard drives which also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any kind of content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.