RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you add to your hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one promptly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use super fast NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your websites considerably. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your data will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.