Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just one single unit where information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary based on the exact setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you upload to your cloud web hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work 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 ensure the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use fast NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even 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 type of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.