RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 key advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives concurrently, if 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 fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Hosting

The revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all hosting accounts are created uses quick SSD drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disks function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out 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 stored on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the data which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are made on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and if a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will remain online because all the information will still load from at least 1 other disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be saved on standard hard disks which also work in RAID as we would like to make certain that any content you upload will be protected all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.