Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all function as one single unit where data is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives shall be the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Website Hosting

The disk drives which we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All of the content that you upload to the website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to concern yourself with the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that work 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 data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID fails, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any chance of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.