RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the 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, etc. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which 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 authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity 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 not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on such a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the problematic drive won't have an impact on the adequate operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information cloned on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online as all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID because we want to make certain that any kind of content you add will be risk-free at all times. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.