RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disk drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is saved on all of the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you add to the web hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your info is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create 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 employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the required info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of sudden hardware failure.