RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, identical data is saved on all the drives and the main benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also improves the performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types can differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data saved on the other drives is copied with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the info which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file properly and to validate the integrity of the information cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the content you upload to your web hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we make VPS server use quick SSD drives which will increase the speed of your sites noticeably. The hard disks operate in RAID to guarantee that you won't lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers take advantage of multiple drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all the info copied on it, which makes it easier to recover the site content without loss if a main drive fails. In case you take advantage of our backup service, the information will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and even though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to ensure that we will have a backup of your site content at all times. With this setup your data will always be safe because it will be available on many disk drives.