RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with 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 information cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the information which is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, the data will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.