RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard drives which function together as a single 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, the very same info is stored on all of the drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud 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 ensure 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 in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives that are used for saving any site content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer work in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter will be a mix calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not affect the normal operation of your websites at all. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is an amazing addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers referred to as checksums so as to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers which use SSD drives operating 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 fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the right data is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online since all the information will still load from at least one other drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be kept on standard hard disks that also work in RAID because we would like to make sure that any website content you upload will be risk-free all the time. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.