RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is stored on all drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order 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 content which you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your websites noticeably. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your data will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.