RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same data is saved on all the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are generated uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your data in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use regular hard drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.