Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to another one immediately without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.