RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done 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. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk within the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS package, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.