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 take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed 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 particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service disturbances and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites noticeably. The drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without loss in case a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the information will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.