RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, 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, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.