RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disk drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is stored on all drives and the key benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which 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 one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized 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 setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server work with fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the website content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple disk drives.