RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs quick SSD drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of security for your data together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to ensure that the information which is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server employ super fast SSD drives which will increase the speed of your sites significantly. The disk drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although 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 content at all times. With this kind of configuration your information will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.