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 employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed 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 fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named 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 duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the correct data is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware failure.