RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you add to your shared hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites since the data will load from the remaining 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 drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being duplicated is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk inside the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use ordinary hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.