Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on a number of hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all work as one single unit where data is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the data on all of the drives shall be the same at all times, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the capabilities and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards 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 placed on quick SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the malfunctioning 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 of the content that you upload will be held on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand 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 case a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each file.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server work with fast SSD drives which will boost the speed of your sites substantially. The hard drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info as a result of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the data is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the information copied on it, that makes it easier to recover the site content without loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you choose our backup service, your data will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and although there is no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup copy of your website content all of the time. With this setup your data will always be safe since it will be available on a lot of drives.