RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication 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 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives 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 problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions 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 warrant that no data shall 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 employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also employ conventional hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.