Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down because the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops working, the system could switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we offer are created on physical servers that employ NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online as all the info will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be saved on standard hard disks that also operate in RAID because we want to make certain that any type of site content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.