Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where data is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives will be identical all the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount 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 which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored 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 working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you use one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is intended 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 in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ standard hard disk drives that function in RAID for storing backups, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.