RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared web hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The hard drives function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you choose our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.