RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical info is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard drives operate together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of protection for your information together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee 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

All virtual private server accounts which our company offers are created on physical servers that use SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be stored on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID as we want to make sure that any site content you add will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.