RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same info is kept on all the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your data along with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information 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 switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, your data will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.