RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same data is kept on all the drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work 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 protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer function in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be copied on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive won't affect the normal operation of your sites in any respect. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is included in the data duplicated on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will remain online since all the info will still load from at least one more hard disk. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be saved on standard disk drives which also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any website content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.