Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just one single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is the same at all times, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

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 known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that 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 content at all times. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on several drives.