Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. 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 function as one single unit where your information is saved. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use regular hard disks that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your site 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.