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 many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the info will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.