RAID, which is an acronym of 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. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done 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, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you add to your shared hosting account will be held on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without any 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 remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the information cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be stored on standard hard drives that also operate in RAID since we would like to make certain that any type of content you add will be safe and sound all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.