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 many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company provides are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the information copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online as all the data will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID since we want to make sure that any site content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.