Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives which will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.