Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive shall be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't have an impact on the proper operation of your Internet sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.