RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into individual ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is kept on all of the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disks work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of security for your data along with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on such a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the proper operation of your websites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites substantially. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use many different drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the information will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.