RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard disks that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical information is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure 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 additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unforeseen hardware failure.