RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical info is kept on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info 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 could switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard disks function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.