RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether 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. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to the website hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the data 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 guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of sudden hardware malfunction.