RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if 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. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your information together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the data cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least one more hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives which also function in RAID as we want to make sure that any type of website content you upload will be protected at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.