Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all work as a single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives shall be exactly the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated employs fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you use one of our VPS server plans, any content you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard disks that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.