RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the brand 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 case a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of sudden hardware malfunction.