RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on several hard drives that operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same information is kept on all drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that if a drive fails, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The hard drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we employ. All the content that you add to your cloud hosting account will be stored on multiple disk drives and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be changed without any service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the work of the sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are generated on physical servers that employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is intended for parity - one additional bit is added to the info copied on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it easier to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged drive so that the accurate info is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. Meanwhile, your Internet sites will remain online because all the info will still load from at least one other disk drive. If you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be kept on standard disk drives which also work in RAID since we would like to make certain that any website content you upload will be risk-free at all times. Working with multiple hard disks in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.