RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, 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 hard disks in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the info that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ standard hard disks which work in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.