RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all 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, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated employs super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your info along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data that is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use ordinary hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.