RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server use high-speed NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, your info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of disk drives.