RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the data will be accessible through the others, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all the 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 many others. Determined by the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content that you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is cloned to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system could switch to a different one quickly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

The SSD drives that we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to ensure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive fails, it is replaced and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to make sure that the correct data is copied and that no file is corrupted since the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks working in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you will use an even more reliable hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any type of unexpected hardware malfunction.