RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disks that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs super fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disks work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ super fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your websites substantially. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this particular setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.