Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all work as a single unit where data is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives will be identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to the cloud web hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are created on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online since all the data will still load from at least one other hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be kept on standard hard drives that also function in RAID since we would like to make certain that any type of site content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.