RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is kept on all of the drives and the key advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon 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 information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system can switch to another one quickly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick SSD drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The hard disks work in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the data 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 recover the content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you use our backup service, the data will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your site content all the time. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.