Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all work as a single unit where info is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be identical all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ depending on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The drives that we employ for storage with our outstanding cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you add to your cloud web hosting account will be saved on multiple drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to guarantee the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives that are used for keeping any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a special configuration where one or more hard drives are used for parity i.e. the system will add an additional bit to any data cloned on such a disk drive. In the event that a disk fails and is replaced with another one, what data will be cloned on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the information on the new drive will be accurate. During the procedure, the RAID will continue functioning adequately and the problematic drive will not affect the normal operation of your websites in any respect. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our revolutionary cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files since ZFS uses unique digital identifiers called checksums in order to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server use extremely fast SSD drives that will raise the speed of your sites substantially. The hard drives function in RAID to guarantee that you will not lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers use multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the site content without loss in the event a main drive stops working. If you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be kept on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this type of setup your data will always be safe as it will be available on several disk drives.