Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where data is saved. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is identical all the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unexpected hardware malfunction.