Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Web Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure 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 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 stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service interruptions 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 warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard disk drives that operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.