RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all 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. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if 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 saved on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your data together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disks that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.