RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on this kind of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your sites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use extremely fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information 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 much easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is 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 of the time. With this type of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.