RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disks which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. In any case, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned 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 info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your information together with the top-notch 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 Servers

In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server use high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use many different 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, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the info will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.