RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same data is kept on all of the drives and the key benefit of using this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be replaced without service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to be concerned about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that employ SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is added to the data duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your websites will stay online because all the information will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be stored on standard hard drives that also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any type of website content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.