RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is stored on all the drives and the key benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall 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 depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we work with. All the content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed with no service disruptions and the data 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 so as to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives that are used for saving any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data duplicated on such a hard drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what info will be copied on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other hard disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the information on the new drive will be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the normal operation of your websites in any way. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our state-of-the-art cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers referred to as checksums in order to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server employ fast SSD drives which will raise the speed of your websites significantly. The disk drives function in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the data will be stored on a separate machine which 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 the time. With this setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on several disk drives.