RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ conventional hard drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.