RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID stops functioning, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard disks that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.