RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is divided into separate ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data which is cloned to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops working because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive fails, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is used for parity - one additional bit is added to the data copied on it and if a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate data is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online because all the info will still load from at least 1 other drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your information will be saved on standard hard drives which also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Using multiple hard disks in RAID for all main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.