Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where info is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the data on all drives will be the same all the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the data which is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

In case you take advantage of one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In the event that a disk within the RAID breaks down, your sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use regular hard drives that function in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.