RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just 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 from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data 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 will never be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand 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 drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the data copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online as all the info will still load from at least one more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we want to make certain that any sort of website content you add will be protected at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.