Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the info that is being duplicated is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. 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 fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use ordinary hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.