RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information that 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 extra guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the needed information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sudden hardware failure.