Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as a single unit where data is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives is the same all the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server work with quick SSD drives which will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The hard disks function in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ many different drives where the info is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without loss if a main drive stops working. If you choose our backup service, your information will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.