Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary based on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all 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 Cloud Hosting

All content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

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 is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The hard disks function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content at all times. With this particular setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on multiple drives.