RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be saved on standard hard disks that also function in RAID since we would like to make certain that any type of website content you add will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.