Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives shall be the same at all times, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it is duplicated 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 some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your information along with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the data that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server packages, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ standard hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.