RAID

RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. Either way, the same info is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. Any content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the data 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 guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unexpected hardware malfunction.