RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized 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 fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

All content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info which will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the info that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites substantially. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use multiple drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, your information will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.