RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed 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, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as 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 duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be stored 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 copy of your site content at all times. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.