RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disks that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same information is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your cloud web hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced 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 information which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each and every file.