RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disks which function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical information is saved on all drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info 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 won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is replaced and the data that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the correct info is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sudden hardware malfunction.