RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use 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. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your websites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a 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 setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.