RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on a number hard disks which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same info is stored on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where information kept on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the info that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of each file correctly and to validate the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content you upload will be stored on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system could switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts which we provide are generated on physical servers that employ SSD drives working in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your websites will remain online as all the info will still load from at least one more drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be saved on standard hard drives that also work in RAID since we would like to make certain that any kind of site content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.