RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical data is kept on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using such a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure 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

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of unpredicted hardware failure.