RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the info will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this particular setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.