Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where info is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives 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, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a defective disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.