RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same info is saved on all the drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID fails because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the information cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID because we want to make certain that any kind of website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.