RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites significantly. The disk drives work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the data will be saved on an independent 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 ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.