RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled 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, etcetera. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disk drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated 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 some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your info along with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which our company provides are created on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard hard drives which also function in RAID because we want to make sure that any kind 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 web hosting service.