RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done 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, and many others. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform where all cloud website hosting accounts are generated uses quick SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard drives work together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances 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 will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use fast SSD drives which will raise the speed of your websites noticeably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, that makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you use our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this setup your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.