RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.