RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a 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 two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, if 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 error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks 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 guarantee the integrity of the info that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the info which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unforeseen hardware malfunction.