RAID

RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all 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, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.