RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to employ many hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among different drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are created employs quick SSD drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so not a single thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your information together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The SSD drives that are used for storing any content uploaded to the semi-dedicated server accounts which 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 include an extra bit to any data copied on such a hard 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 drives and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that the data on the new drive will be accurate. Throughout the procedure, the RAID will continue operating normally and the faulty drive will not have an effect on the proper operation of your Internet sites at all. Using SSDs in RAID-Z is a great addition to the ZFS file system that runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files as ZFS uses unique digital identifiers named checksums to avoid silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts which our company offers are made on physical servers which employ SSD drives functioning in RAID. At least one drive is intended for parity - one extra bit is included in the info duplicated on it and in case a main disk stops working, this bit makes it much simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed hard disk so that the right information is restored on the new drive added to the RAID. At the same time, your websites will stay online since all the data will still load from at least one more hard disk. If you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the data will be saved on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID since we want to make sure that any type of site content you add will be protected all of the time. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.