Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where info is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all of the drives will be the same all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which 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 extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the info that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unforeseen hardware failure.