RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed 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, and so on. Determined by the particular 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 function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information 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 as soon as we replace the faulty one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which our company provides are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to 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 failed drive so that the right info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least one other hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard drives which also work in RAID since we want to make certain that any sort of site content you upload will be protected all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.