RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the 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 just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your info together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the required data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unforeseen hardware malfunction.