RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is saved on all drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive fails, the system could switch to another one right away without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the needed info is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unexpected hardware malfunction.