RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Our advanced cloud web hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated employs quick SSD drives instead of the traditional HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the other drives, it's copied 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 whatever reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service interruptions. This is another level of protection for your data in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard disks 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 data which is cloned to a new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.