RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical info is stored on all of the drives and the basic benefit of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds 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 information is synced between the drives - whether it is written 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 and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in VPS

In case you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use regular hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.