Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where your information is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content that you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so once 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 that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers which use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any kind of website content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.