Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be identical all of the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the malfunctioning one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web 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. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is changed, the data which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are created on physical servers which use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least one more hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be saved on standard hard drives that also work in RAID since we would like to make sure that any kind of content you add will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.