RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive fails, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the site content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, your information will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although 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 content at all times. With this type of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.