RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration 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 website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the needed info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.