Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives is identical at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ depending on the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Web Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data copied on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info 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 make sure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive will not have an impact on the proper operation of your sites in any way. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as 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 raise the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.