RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard disk drives which work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into different ones using virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is saved on all the drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors indicate that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are made employs super fast SSD drives as opposed to the traditional HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus not a single thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is one more level of protection for your information in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to guarantee that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we generate VPS server work with fast SSD drives which will increase the speed of your sites considerably. The hard drives work in RAID to make sure that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers employ multiple drives where the information is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, that makes it much easier to recover the site content without any loss in case a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, the info will be kept on an individual machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your site content all of the time. With this kind of configuration your info will always be safe because it will be available on multiple drives.