RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. Either way, identical data is kept on all drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you upload to the cloud hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives 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 makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unpredicted hardware malfunction.