RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disk drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you add to your shared hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system performs 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 information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, the info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.