Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where your information is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives will be identical all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed 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 potential for corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ conventional hard disks which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.