RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The advanced cloud web hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some 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 stored on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your info together with the state-of-the-art 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 info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be copied on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various 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 operate 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 employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the info that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unpredicted hardware failure.