RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done 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. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced with no service disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your data will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.