RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on multiple hard disk drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is stored on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all of the 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 all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be copied on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least one drive is employed 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 case a disk from the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.