RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated 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 so as to ensure that the information that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The drives function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in case a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, your info will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.