Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard disks simultaneously. A RAID could 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 one single unit where data is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all drives will be identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the info that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives which we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the information which will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard drives working in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unpredicted hardware failure.