Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where information is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives will be the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized 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 referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee 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

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least 1 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. In the event that a disk within the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the information that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard drives which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.