Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where data is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the exact setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in 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 Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be held on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is changed and the info which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct information is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unforeseen hardware malfunction.