RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard 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 could switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use extremely fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, your data will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content at all times. With this type of setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.