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 employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced without service disturbances 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 remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your info will be stored 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 copy of your site content all of the time. With this setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.