RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disks which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical information is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to your cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.