Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all work as a single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disks work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information along with the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more disk drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't have an effect on the adequate operation of your websites in any way. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also use standard hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.