RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disks which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical data is saved on all the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances 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 drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online since all the information will still load from at least one other drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be saved on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID since we want to make certain that any website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.