RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same info is stored on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized 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. These factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you add to the shared hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the information which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will still be online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be kept on standard hard disks that also function in RAID because we would like to make certain that any sort of site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.