Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Website Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you upload to your website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that use NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the correct data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will remain online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be stored on standard disk drives which also function in RAID since we want to make certain that any type of site content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.