RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is stored on all of the drives and the key advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least one other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be stored on standard hard drives that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any sort of website content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.