RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is another level of security for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we offer are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be saved on standard disk drives which also function in RAID as we would like to make certain that any content you upload will be safe and sound all of the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.