RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be replaced without any service disruptions and the information 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 in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific disk drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that our company provides are created on physical servers which take advantage of SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the information copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate data is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your sites will still be online as all the data will still load from at least one more hard drive. In the event that you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be saved on standard disk drives which also operate in RAID since we want to make certain that any kind of site content you upload will be safe and sound all the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.