Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives will be the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info 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 setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server packages, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID stops working, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.