RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, if 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 differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your websites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the malfunctioning one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info you upload to your cloud website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be held on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that 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 information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with high-speed SSD drives that will boost the speed of your websites noticeably. The hard drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your info will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.