RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, identical data is stored on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives that we use for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without service disturbances and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content which you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops working as the website 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 the fact that even in case a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that our company provides are generated on physical servers that employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to the information copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will remain online since all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be stored on standard hard disks that also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any website content you upload will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.