RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.