RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, whether 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 could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we work with. All of the content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one shall be employed 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 fails, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data 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 the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use extremely fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your information will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although 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 content at all times. With this type of setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.