Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where your information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all 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, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you upload to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed with no service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances 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 will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the info cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be stored on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any type of content you upload will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.