RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disk drives which function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, the same info is kept on all drives and the key benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function 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 one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity 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 will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.