RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server use fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites noticeably. The disk drives function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.