RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service interruptions and the info 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 information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the data that is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The disk drives work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.