RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall 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 of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data 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. All of these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored 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 in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes 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 avoided. We also employ conventional hard disks that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.