RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disk drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. Either way, the same info is stored on all the drives and the key benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard drives which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. Any content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will be used 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 functioning, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID stops working because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you use one of our VPS server solutions, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which function in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity to ensure the integrity of the information. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk from the RAID stops working, your sites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data during the process is avoided. We also employ regular hard disk drives which function in RAID for storing backups, so in case you include this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be saved on multiple drives and you'll never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.