RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unforeseen hardware malfunction.