RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disks which operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied 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 whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your information in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is changed, the data that 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 ensure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your websites noticeably. The disk drives work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your information will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a 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 type of configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.