RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the information copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will remain online as all the data will still load from at least one other hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be kept on standard hard drives that also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any type of website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.