Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where information is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether info 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, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The disk drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to the shared hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, 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 hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the site 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 fails, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the data duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will still be online as all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your data will be stored on standard disk drives that also work in RAID because we would like to make sure that any type of website content you upload will be protected at all times. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.