RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a disk 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 drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the faulty drive won't affect the normal operation of your sites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a fantastic addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers known as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.