RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is stored on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is 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 fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to the cloud hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed with no service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never have to concern yourself with losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra 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 brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content that you upload will be saved on SSD drives that function in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk inside the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. By doing this, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also use standard hard disk drives that work in RAID for storing backup copies, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your site content will be saved on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.