Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where your information is stored. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives shall be identical all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also enhanced since the reading and writing processes can be split between multiple drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may differ based on the exact setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all cloud hosting accounts are generated employs fast SSD drives rather than the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, several hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is copied 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 whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a single thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is an additional level of protection for your information along with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites as the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is correct, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server work with extremely fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites significantly. The drives operate in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any data because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ many different drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the info copied on it, which makes it easier to restore the content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. If you use our backup service, your info will be stored on an individual machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup of your website content at all times. With this type of setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on a lot of drives.