Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all function as one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

All content which you upload to your new hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your info is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity to guarantee the integrity of your information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be duplicated on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ ordinary hard drives which operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.