RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives as opposed to the classic HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your data along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data is intact. During this process, your sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which we offer are made on physical servers which employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least one drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the data copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right data is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. Meanwhile, your sites will still be online since all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. In case you add regular backups to your VPS plan, a copy of your data will be saved on standard hard drives which also work in RAID because we want to make certain that any type of site content you add will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple hard drives in RAID for all main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.