Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives will be identical all of the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all the 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 so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your info together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers which employ NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online as all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard disks which also operate in RAID as we want to make certain that any kind of site content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.