RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one 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 what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data 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 each file adequately and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your shared web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data cloned on this kind of a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the normal operation of your sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use standard hard disk drives which work in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.