Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives shall be identical all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your info along with the advanced ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data which is being copied is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ fast NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without loss in case a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your site content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.