RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard drives that operate together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. Either way, the same info is saved on all of the drives and the main advantage of using such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data located on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the other drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a special digital fingerprint for every single 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 company, all of the content which you upload will be saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning as the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The SSD drives that we use on the physical machines where we set up virtual private servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive stops working, it is changed and the info which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the right info is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any sort of sudden hardware malfunction.