RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is split into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same information is kept on all drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded 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 fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the faulty one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content you upload will be saved on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive fails, the system could switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use super fast SSD drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers take advantage of many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you choose our backup service, your data will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all of the time. With this type of setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.