Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where data is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a hard drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers called checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you employ one of our VPS server packages, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which function in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the defective one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use standard hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.