RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your sites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the data will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.