Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is that they all function as just one single unit where info is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives will be identical at all times, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced because the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in VPS Hosting

If you employ one of our virtual private server packages, any content you upload will be kept on SSD drives that work in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID breaks down, your websites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the defective one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any potential for corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also employ standard hard disks that work in RAID for storing backups, so in case you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be stored on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.