Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall 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 kind of data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the data that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company offers are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online since all the information will still load from at least one more hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard disk drives that also work in RAID since we would like to make sure that any type of website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.