Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where your information is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives is the same all of the time, so even if a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different types of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance could differ based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be held on quick SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ 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 verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content you upload will be saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a hard drive fails, the system could switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives which we use on the machines where we create VPS servers work in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of data is added to any data copied on it. In case a main drive breaks down, it is replaced and the data which will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. That’s done to ensure that the required info is copied and that no file is corrupted because the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so in the event that you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you will use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any type of sudden hardware malfunction.