RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, 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 exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple disk 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. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your websites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.