RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the data that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the information cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least one more disk drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID as we want to make certain that any content you upload will be protected all the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.