RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops working, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to authenticate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the content you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system which compares a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be copied on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick SSD drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard disks operate in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without loss if a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the info will be saved on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on several disk drives.