RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into individual ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All 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 use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication 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 one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the needed info is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unpredicted hardware malfunction.