Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information that will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unforeseen hardware malfunction.