RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives which we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service disturbances and the info will be recovered 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 in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you use one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to ensure the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk from the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use standard hard drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your site 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 breakdowns.