RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types depending on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives which are used for keeping any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we provide function in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on this type of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is replaced with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the remaining drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be correct. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not have an effect on the adequate operation of your sites in any way. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an excellent addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our revolutionary cloud platform with respect to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses special digital identifiers identified as checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with fast SSD drives that will raise the speed of your websites considerably. The hard drives operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the website content without any loss in case a main drive breaks down. If you use our backup service, the data will be kept on an individual 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 make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.