RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your 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 couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

If you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use conventional hard disk drives which work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.