RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all of the 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 so on. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content which you upload to your shared hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a defective disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the info which will be cloned on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unpredicted hardware failure.