Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are created on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives working in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be kept on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any site content you upload will be protected at all times. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.