RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use 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 the same. This kind of a setup has two key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the info will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled 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, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data stored on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites shall continue working from the other ones and after we replace the faulty one, the data that will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the information from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the elements of each and every file correctly and to verify the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the content that you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for every single file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The physical servers where we generate virtual private server work with super fast SSD drives which will increase the speed of your Internet sites substantially. The drives operate in RAID to ensure that you won't lose any info due to a power loss or a hardware malfunction. The production servers work with a variety of drives where the data is stored and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all data copied on it, which makes it much easier to recover the website content without loss in the event a main drive fails. If you take advantage of our backup service, your information will be stored on an independent machine which uses standard hard-disk drives and despite the fact that there isn't a parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to make sure that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this particular configuration your info will always be safe since it will be available on several drives.