Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the info copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be stored on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any type of site content you upload will be protected all of the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.