RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives simultaneously, 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 error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ extremely fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, your data will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content at all times. With this particular configuration your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.