Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the information copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least one more drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be kept on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any kind of website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.