RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some 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 recorded on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of security for your data along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment 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 information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your websites significantly. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the site content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your data will be kept on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.