RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard disk drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical information is saved on all drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your data along with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though 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 website content at all times. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of disk drives.