Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all function as a single unit where data is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with super fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive stops working. In case you use our backup service, the info will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this type of setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.