Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the 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 functioning, the system could switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server work with quick NVMe drives that will increase the speed of your websites noticeably. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the information will be kept on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.