RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is saved on all drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Hosting

All content which you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the information that will be copied on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the information which is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info as 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 separate drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you use one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID stops functioning, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ conventional hard disk drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.