RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disks which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same data is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra 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 saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this type of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be copied on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the faulty drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers named checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, the data will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all of the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.