RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made employs quick NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a single thing 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 state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company provides are made on physical servers that use NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the info copied on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online as all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be stored on standard disk drives that also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any type of content you add will be risk-free all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.