RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, identical data is saved on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the bad one, the info that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file adequately and to verify the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes 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 websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content 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 drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with extremely fast SSD drives which will raise the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be saved on a separate 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 make sure that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.