Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives is the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances 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 that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard drives work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.