Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all perform as a single unit where your information is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all the drives is identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the info 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 functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers which employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the correct info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. If you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your info will be stored on standard hard disks that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any sort of site content you add will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.