RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, the very same info is stored on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is copied 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 data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information 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 working, the system can switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use regular hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.