RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard drives that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They function 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 hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info which will be copied on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server employ high-speed SSD drives which will raise the speed of your sites substantially. The disk drives function in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without loss in case a main drive fails. If you pick our backup service, the information will be stored on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of disk drives.