Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact 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, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the information will be kept on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.