RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones through virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the error tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - any time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the information that is being duplicated is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the separate drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server use super fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to restore the site content without loss in case a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on multiple disk drives.