RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, 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 particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet 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

All virtual private server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the information copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard hard disks which also function in RAID since we would like to make certain that any site content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.