RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you upload to the cloud hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be recovered 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 to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting 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. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info copied on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least 1 other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be kept on standard disk drives that also function in RAID as we would like to make certain that any sort of website content you add will be protected all the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.