Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where information is kept. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives will be identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers that take advantage of NVMe drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be saved on standard hard disks which also work in RAID because we would like to make sure that any content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Employing multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.