RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, 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 based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to your web hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID breaks down since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be saved on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of content you upload will be risk-free all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.