RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your information along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your websites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard drives work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, the info will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's 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 all the time. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.