RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard disk drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is split into separate ones via virtualization software. In either case, identical data is saved on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types 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 info is synced 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 imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our innovative cloud web hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it will be changed without service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be copied on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info which is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the information copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be kept on standard disk drives that also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any type of content you upload will be protected all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.