Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where info is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Web Hosting

The drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to the web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server employ quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The drives work in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the info will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.