RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard disk drives that operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, identical data is saved on all drives and the key advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the 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 and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The disk drives which we employ for storage with our ground-breaking cloud Internet hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced with no service disturbances and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you'll never have to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ fast SSD drives that will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The disk drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any data as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use a variety of drives where the data is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the website content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content at all times. With this kind of setup your information will always be safe as it will be available on a lot of disk drives.