Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what data will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining disks and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the malfunctioning drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites by any means. 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 in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers named checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server employ high-speed NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the info will be stored on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.