RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the very same information is saved on all of the drives and the basic advantage of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also improves the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are generated uses super fast SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, 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 if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is another level of security for your data together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives that are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we provide work in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an extra bit to any data copied on this type of a drive. If a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what information will be cloned on the latter will be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue functioning normally and the faulty drive won't have an impact on the adequate operation of your Internet sites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our advanced cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums to prevent silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers which employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is added to the information copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the right info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will remain online since all the info will still load from at least one other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the info will be saved on standard disk drives which also function in RAID since we want to make sure that any kind of content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple hard drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.