Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Website Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses fast NVMe drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is an additional level of protection for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The NVMe drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data cloned on this type of a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the data on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue working normally and the problematic drive will not have an impact on the adequate operation of your websites by any means. Using NVMes in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that use NVMe drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will stay online as all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the information will be kept on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any type of website content you add will be protected at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.