RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done 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. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data 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 setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk from the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard disks which function in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.