RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into individual ones via virtualization software. In either case, the same information is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized 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 imply that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to validate the integrity of the info duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in case a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the information will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content at all times. With this setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.