RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, 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 different drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all the 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. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your info together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on such a drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your sites by any means. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our advanced cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this type of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.