RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all 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 particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied 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 some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your info together with the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your websites will stay online as all the data will still load from at least one more hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be saved on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID as we want to make certain that any type of site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.