Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where data is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all of the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary based on the exact 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, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account together with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be copied on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the needed information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unforeseen hardware malfunction.