RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the faulty one, the data that will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each and every file properly and to confirm the integrity of the information duplicated on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info that you upload to your cloud website hosting account together with the ZFS file system which analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet 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 one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is changed, the info which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

The SSD drives which we use on the physical machines where we create VPS servers operate in RAID to make sure that any content that you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is used for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. If a main drive fails, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the other drives and the parity one. That’s done to make sure that the right info is copied and that no file is corrupted as the new drive will be used in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disks functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service as your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of unforeseen hardware failure.