RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without any service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content which 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 synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use standard hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.