RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disk drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon 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 info 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 of these factors imply that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you add to your shared hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment 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 info as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ quick NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, your data will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.