RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The advanced cloud hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, the data will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.