Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where info is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives is the same all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info kept on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the data duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with extremely fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your Internet sites considerably. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.