RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disk drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into individual ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same data is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated employs quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned 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 thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, which means that practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your information in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The disk drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use a variety of drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, the information will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.