RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized 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 suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using 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 not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the right information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unforeseen hardware failure.