RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server 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. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard disks that function in RAID for storing backups, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.