RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives which work together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. In either case, identical info is saved on all of the drives and the key benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as 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 performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info 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 of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we use. All of the content that you upload to the hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content you upload will be held on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

In case you employ one of our virtual private server plans, any content that you upload will be stored on SSD drives which operate in RAID. At least a single drive is used for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where information is copied with one bit added to it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the flawed one, the bits of the info that will be duplicated on it are calculated by using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any chance of corrupting data throughout the process is averted. We also use regular hard disks which operate in RAID for storing backups, so if you add this service to your VPS plan, your content will be stored on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.