RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed 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 information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unforeseen hardware malfunction.