RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disks 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 separate ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is kept on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon 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's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be stored on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is changed, the data that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to ensure that the information is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant 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 Hosting

The physical servers where we create virtual private server employ quick SSD drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers use a variety of drives where the information is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the data will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's 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 the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on multiple disk drives.