RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disk drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same data is stored on all of the drives and the main advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you add to your website hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service interruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use high-speed SSD drives that will boost the speed of your websites significantly. The drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you choose our backup service, your data will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this type of configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.