Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary based on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

If you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function 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 information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.