RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, 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 fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.