RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to employ multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The SSD drives which are used for storing any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific setup where one or more drives are employed for parity i.e. the system will add an extra bit to any data duplicated on this kind of a drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with another one, what info will be duplicated on the latter shall be a combination calculated between the data on the other disks and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive shall be correct. Throughout the process, the RAID will continue working adequately and the faulty drive won't have an effect on the proper operation of your sites in any respect. Working with SSDs in RAID-Z is an impressive addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our cutting-edge cloud platform with regards to preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses specific digital identifiers identified as checksums so as to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The SSD drives that we use on the physical machines where we generate virtual private servers work in RAID to make sure that any content which you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data cloned on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the required information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted since the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. We also use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service since your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of sudden hardware malfunction.