Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is identical at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

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

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on this type of a drive. If a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive will not affect the adequate operation of your sites in any respect. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server use extremely fast NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in case a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of drives.