RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive doesn't work, the info will be accessible through the others, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is duplicated with an extra bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the information which will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file properly and to validate the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is another level of security for the info which you upload to your hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the info that will be cloned on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the data which is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is an extra warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives to be able to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with quick SSD drives that will increase the speed of your websites considerably. The hard disks work in RAID to ensure that you will not lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ multiple drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be stored on a separate machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and although there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content at all times. With this type of configuration your data will always be safe as it will be available on many disk drives.