Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as just a single unit where information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives 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, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another 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 info is saved on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on SSD drives that function 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 functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info that 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 extra warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server packages, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the malfunctioning one, the bits of the information that will be cloned on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also use conventional hard disks that operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.