RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed 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, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one immediately without service disruptions 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 in order to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disk drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.