RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your info along with the top-notch 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 data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information that is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the required information is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unforeseen hardware failure.