RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into independent ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same information is kept on all the drives and the key benefit of using such a setup is that in the event that a drive fails, the data will still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info stored on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data that will be duplicated on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we make virtual private server employ fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites considerably. The drives function in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with multiple drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in case a main drive stops working. In case you pick our backup service, your information will be kept on an individual machine that 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 of your website content all of the time. With this particular setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on multiple drives.