RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical information is saved on all of the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded 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 fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held 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 hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which 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 info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using 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 won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of sudden hardware failure.