RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disk drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is kept on all the drives and the main advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored 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 working efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which our company provides are created on physical servers that use SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the info cloned on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the correct info is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will remain online as all the info will still load from at least one other hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be stored on standard hard drives which also operate in RAID since we would like to make sure that any content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.