RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information kept on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the information that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the information that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content you upload will be stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks 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 data which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The SSD drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive stops working, it is replaced and the data which will be cloned on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the needed info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any unforeseen hardware failure.