Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where data is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives will be identical all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops working as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with high-speed NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, your info will be stored on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.