Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just one single unit where information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced with no service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the malfunctioning drive will not impact the adequate operation of your sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers known as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, the information will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.