Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary based on the exact setup - whether info 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 Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any 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 won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers which take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the right data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will remain online since all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be kept on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we would like to make sure that any type of website content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.