Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives is the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sudden hardware failure.