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 drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where your information is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all drives is the same all the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The general performance is enhanced as well because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Web Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform where all web hosting accounts are made uses fast SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disks operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, therefore not a thing will be lost and there won't be any service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your information in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the information which will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Web Hosting

All virtual private server accounts that we provide are created on physical servers that employ SSD drives operating in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is included in the info copied on it and in case a main disk fails, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the damaged disk drive so that the right information is recovered on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your Internet sites will stay online because all the info will still load from at least 1 more hard disk. In case you add routine backups to your VPS plan, a copy of the info will be stored on standard hard disks which also function in RAID because we want to make sure that any kind of website content you add will be risk-free all of the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable Internet hosting service.