Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where your information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives will be identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what 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 sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to confirm the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand 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 hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one right away without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you employ one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use regular hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.