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

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated uses super fast NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your information together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites noticeably. The disk drives function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive fails. If you choose our backup service, your info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all the time. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.