Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the info on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether information is written on all the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The drives which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without any service disturbances and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a faulty disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server use quick NVMe drives which will raise the speed of your sites considerably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the website content without any loss if a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, your info will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.