RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is saved on all drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced 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. These factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the information which 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. We do this to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.