Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all perform as just a single unit where data is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all drives will be the same all the time, so even in case one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Shared Hosting

All content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is copied on this specific hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the data which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the information is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that our company offers are created on physical servers which take advantage of SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is used for parity - one additional bit is included in the information cloned on it and if a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right info is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will remain online since all the data will still load from at least 1 other drive. If you add routine backups to your VPS package, a copy of the data will be stored on standard disk drives which also function in RAID because we want to make certain that any content you upload will be safe and sound at all times. Employing multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers enables us to offer fast and reliable web hosting service.