Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where data is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all drives is the same all of the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may differ based on the particular setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you upload to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the info that is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are made on physical servers that employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the information duplicated on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the right data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will still be online as all the information will still load from at least one more drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard disks which also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any sort of content you add will be protected at all times. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.