Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where your information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives is identical at all times, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers that employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the right data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will stay online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard hard drives which also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any site content you add will be protected at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.