RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all 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, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security 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 info is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disks that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.