RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives which we use for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your shared hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed with no service interruptions and the information will be recovered 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 to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole 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 which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ extremely fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The disk drives operate in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, your data will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all the time. With this setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.