RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the data 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 will continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server plans, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.