Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives is the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the correct information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least one other drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any site content you add will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.