RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disks that work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, the same info is saved on all the drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances 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 disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances 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 warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we offer are generated on physical servers which use SSD drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least 1 more drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any site content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.