RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally because RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without any service disruptions 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 which uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we generate VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact at all times. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. If a main drive stops working, it is changed and the data which will be cloned on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right data is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any unpredicted hardware failure.