Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be identical at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives 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, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system could switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use high-speed NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, the data will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.