Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives is identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in 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 Shared Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made uses super fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, multiple hard disks work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your information together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with super fast NVMe drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The hard disks operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you choose our backup service, the information will be saved on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.