Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where data is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives shall be the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed with no service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the data that is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

If you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single 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 within the RAID stops functioning, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use standard hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.