RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives which we use for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you upload to the shared hosting account will be kept on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we provide are created on physical servers which employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the correct data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will still be online as all the information will still load from at least 1 other hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID because we would like to make sure that any website content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.