RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to employ many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all 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, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disks work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned 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 whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of security for your data in addition to the cutting-edge 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 information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the information which will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unexpected hardware failure.