RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disk drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we use. Any content that you upload to the shared hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated 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 make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using 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 made on physical servers that employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online as all the information will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard disk drives which also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any sort of site content you add will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.