Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company provides are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the data cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be stored on standard disk drives which also function in RAID as we want to make certain that any type of site content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.