RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed with no service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances 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 won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unforeseen hardware failure.