RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disks that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is saved on all the drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive fails, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is performed on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be saved on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive fails, the system could switch to a different one right away without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that we offer are generated on physical servers which use SSD drives working in RAID. At least one drive is intended 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 simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. At the same time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the data will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard hard drives that also work in RAID as we want to make sure that any sort of content you upload will be risk-free all of the time. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.