RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disk drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the info which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unpredicted hardware failure.