Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID can 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 perform as one single unit where info is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops working, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the information which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

In case you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content you upload will be saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk from the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ standard hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.