RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. Such a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all drives at the same time, if 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 exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Hosting

The cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's copied 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 some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service interruptions. This is one more level of security for your data together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a defective disk is replaced, the info that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company provides are created on physical servers that take advantage of SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is included in the information cloned on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it much easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the accurate information is recovered on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your sites will stay online because all the information will still load from at least 1 more disk drive. In case you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of your information will be kept on standard hard disks which also function in RAID as we want to make certain that any type of website content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers allows us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.