Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the information that is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we generate virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the correct information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unforeseen hardware failure.