RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is stored on all drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with 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 authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives which are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more hard drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what information will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive shall be accurate. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the malfunctioning drive won't impact the normal operation of your websites in any respect. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform with regard to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the information copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged hard disk so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online because all the data will still load from at least one more drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the information will be stored on standard disk drives which also function in RAID because we would like to make sure that any sort of site content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Working with multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.