RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is another level of protection for your information together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive fails, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server use extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you pick our backup service, the info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.