Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just one single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives is the same at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data that is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server plans, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use ordinary hard drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.