RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is saved on all drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your websites 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 remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content which you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are generated on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the data duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will stay online since all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be saved on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any website content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.