Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where your information is saved. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives will be the same all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available 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 can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it's 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 content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each and every file.