Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all work as just a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives shall be identical all the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Hosting

All content which you upload to your new hosting account will be held on quick SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that 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 information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned 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 make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions 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 will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that employ SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one extra bit is included in the info cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed drive so that the accurate information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online as all the data will still load from at least 1 other hard disk. In the event that you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be kept on standard disk drives which also function in RAID as we would like to make sure that any type of site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.