Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives is the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the bad one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information you upload to your web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without 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 that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we offer are generated on physical servers that employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will remain online as all the data will still load from at least one more disk drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be kept on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID since we would like to make certain that any content you upload will be protected all the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.