RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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 exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server packages, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use standard hard disks which work in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.