Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives is identical at all times, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unforeseen hardware malfunction.