RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled 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, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your site content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating smoothly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS

If you take advantage of one of our virtual private server plans, any content you upload will be saved on SSD drives that work in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity so as to ensure the integrity of your data. In simple terms, this is a special drive where info is copied with one bit added to it. If a disk inside the RAID stops working, your websites will continue working and when a new disk takes the place of the defective one, the bits of the data that will be cloned on it are calculated using the healthy and the parity drives. That way, any probability of corrupting data during the process is prevented. We also employ regular hard disk drives which operate in RAID for storing backup copies, so should you include this service to your VPS package, your content will be kept on multiple drives and you won't ever have to worry about its integrity even in the event of multiple drive breakdowns.