Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where information is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives is exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee 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 info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data that is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

In case you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content that you upload will be saved on SSD drives that operate in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, your sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any possibility of corrupting data during the process is averted. We also employ regular hard disk drives which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.