RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard disks which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same data is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud 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 employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the data that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions 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 ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use regular hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your site 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.