RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard drives that function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is divided into independent ones through virtualization software. In either case, the very same info is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing this kind of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data 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 error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives as an alternative to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore practically nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your info in addition to the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

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

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with super fast SSD drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers use many different drives where the info is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without any loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you use our backup service, your data will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your content all of the time. With this type of configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on many disk drives.