Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as 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 in case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the information which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the correct data is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any kind of sudden hardware failure.