RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disruptions 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 shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites noticeably. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the information will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.