Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where info is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between various drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without any service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to worry about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID fails since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each and every file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server use fast SSD drives that will boost the speed of your Internet sites significantly. The drives work in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information due to a power loss or a hardware failure. The production servers work with many different drives where the info is saved and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the information copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the data will be saved on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup of your website content all the time. With this particular setup your info will always be safe as it will be available on many drives.