Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where info is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers function in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of unpredicted hardware malfunction.