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 a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your data along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this particular setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.