RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what data will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue working adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't affect the normal operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, the information will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.