RAID

What's RAID? How exactly does RAID work? Discover the advantages of employing a RAID-equipped server.

Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives is identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites considerably. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.