RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disk drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, the same data is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are created employs super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your data in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your sites significantly. The disk drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is kept 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 restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your data will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all of the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.