RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs fast SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives work together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is 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 some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of security for your information in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. This is done to guarantee that the data which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the different drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server use fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your websites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all information copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without any loss if a main drive breaks down. If you pick our backup service, the data will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all the time. With this kind of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of disk drives.