Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as just one single unit where data is stored. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ according to the exact setup - whether data is written on all 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, etc.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on 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'll continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the websites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware malfunction.