RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same information is kept on all of the drives and the main benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you upload to your hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.