RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is kept on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be 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 kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done 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 interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the data cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will remain online since all the information will still load from at least one more hard drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be kept on standard hard drives that also operate in RAID because we want to make certain that any sort of content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Using multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.