RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks which function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized 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. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all 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 this kind of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with super fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this type of configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.