RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all 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. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate 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 additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ quick NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the website content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your data will be kept on a separate machine which 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 guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.