RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the cloud website hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will 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. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online as all the data will still load from at least one other disk drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make certain that any type of website content you add will be protected all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.