RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key 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 accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, if 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, etc. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your data together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company offers are made on physical servers that employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be saved on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we want to make sure that any site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.