Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all work as one single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether data 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 Shared Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive shall be correct. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses unique digital identifiers referred to as checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss if a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, the info will be saved on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all the time. With this configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.