RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard drives that work together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones using virtualization software. In any case, identical information is saved on all of the drives and the main benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the info which will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info which is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of the files on the separate drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company offers are generated on physical servers which use SSD drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info duplicated on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will remain online because all the data will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be kept on standard hard drives which also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any website content you add will be protected all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.