Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where information is kept. The top advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives will be the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared website hosting accounts are generated employs fast SSD drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you take advantage of one of our virtual private server solutions, any content you upload will be saved on SSD drives that operate in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk part of the RAID stops functioning, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the faulty one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use conventional hard disks which work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS package, your site content will be stored on multiple drives and you'll never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.