RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical info is saved on all the drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the info 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 so as to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

If you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ regular hard disks that function in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.