RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the information 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 elements of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive will be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the problematic drive will not affect the adequate operation of your Internet sites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unexpected hardware failure.