RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed 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, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you upload to your shared hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication which 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

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

If you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use regular hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.