Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disks at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where info is stored. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the data on all the drives shall be identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you add to the shared hosting account will be held on multiple drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without service disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers which employ NVMe drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the info cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will stay online as all the data will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be kept on standard disk drives that also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any site content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.