RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is stored on all drives and the basic advantage 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 improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors suggest that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you add to your hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives 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. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss if a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content at all times. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.