RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives which work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is kept on all drives and the key benefit of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

The revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are created employs fast SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives operate together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your info in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to guarantee that the information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server work with quick SSD drives which will boost the speed of your websites substantially. The hard disks operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with many different drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the website content without loss in case a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, your data will be kept on a separate machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.