Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where your information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive fails, it is replaced and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.