Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where your information is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives is exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives rather than the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disks work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites noticeably. The disk drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, your information will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your info will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.