Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all of the drives shall be the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better as the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the information which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can 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 analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The NVMe drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information that will be copied on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the needed info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable web hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.