Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just a single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives shall be identical all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to the cloud web hosting account will be stored on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the Internet sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The NVMe drives which we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the required data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be a part of the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unpredicted hardware failure.