Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on multiple hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as one single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives will be the same at all times, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info 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 operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional 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 since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that function in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use conventional hard drives that operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.