Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is cloned to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

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 a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the 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 fails, your websites 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. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also use regular hard drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.