Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where data is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives is the same all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you upload to the shared hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without any service interruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is changed, the data which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.