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 multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the information that will be copied on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the information which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.