Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where info is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info 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 data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if 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 disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as 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 kind of data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you employ one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the 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 from the RAID stops working, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use standard hard disks which work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.