Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all of the drives is identical all of the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the information which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to authenticate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we set up VPS servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive fails, it is replaced and the info that will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right information is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unexpected hardware failure.