Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be identical all the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance can vary according to the particular setup - whether info is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all hosting accounts are created employs quick NVMe drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the revolutionary ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives which are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating adequately and the malfunctioning drive won't affect the adequate operation of your sites at all. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is a superb addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers known as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server employ fast NVMe drives that will boost the speed of your websites considerably. The hard disks function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the content without any loss in case a main drive fails. In case you choose our backup service, the info will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this particular configuration your information will always be safe since it will be available on many drives.