RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity so as to guarantee the integrity of your info. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk within the RAID stops functioning, your Internet sites will continue working and when a new disk replaces the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any probability of corrupting data throughout the process is avoided. We also use ordinary hard drives that work in RAID for storing backups, so should you add this service to your VPS plan, your website content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never need to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive failures.