RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance because 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 done from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are generated employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire 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 warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info which will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct data is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unpredicted hardware malfunction.