RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same info is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee 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 part of the RAID stops working, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard disks that operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.