RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about losing any data no matter what.

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 referred to as RAID-Z. What's 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 special drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a defective disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that 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 Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the information copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online as all the information will still load from at least one other drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be kept on standard hard drives that also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any sort of site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.