RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated employs fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated 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 whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that work 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 happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content 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 copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of sudden hardware failure.