RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, 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 Web Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without any service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional 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 failed drive so that the right info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard disks that also work in RAID because we would like to make certain that any site content you add will be protected at all times. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.