Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disks at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives will be identical at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ depending on the exact 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 Website Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information stored on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be kept on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your content all the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.