RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all 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 is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info that is being cloned is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

If you take advantage of one of our VPS server plans, any content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which function in RAID. At least a single drive is intended for parity to guarantee the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where data is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk in the RAID fails, your websites will continue working and when a new disk substitutes the malfunctioning one, the bits of the data that will be copied on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. This way, any possibility of corrupting data throughout the process is prevented. We also employ ordinary hard disks which function in RAID for storing backup copies, so in case you include this service to your VPS package, your site content will be kept on multiple drives and you will never have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.