RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is stored on all the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, the info will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.