Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives will be the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

If you employ one of our virtual private server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use regular hard drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.