RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it works by using the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each file adequately and to confirm the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive fails, the system could switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with extremely fast SSD drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The disk drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the site content without any loss if a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all of the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on many drives.