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 use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared website 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 which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the information that is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the different drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server use fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the info 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 recover the content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, your data will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.