RAID, which stands 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 a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system could switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the correct info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unexpected hardware failure.