RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information saved on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the info that will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content that you upload to your cloud website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the info that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we offer are made on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one additional bit is added to the data cloned on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online since all the information will still load from at least 1 more hard drive. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID as we would like to make certain that any site content you upload will be protected at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.