RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the information 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. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled 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 many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are made uses quick SSD drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is an additional level of security for your information along with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the 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 in case a drive fails, the system can switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive fails, it is replaced and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of unforeseen hardware malfunction.