RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into individual ones via virtualization software. In either case, the same data is kept on all drives and the key advantage of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information that is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use super fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites substantially. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.