RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The state-of-the-art cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are generated employs quick SSD drives as an alternative to the traditional HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disk drives function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the other drives, it is copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, which means that not a thing will be lost and there will not be any service disturbances. This is another level of protection for your data together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in VPS Servers

The physical servers where we create VPS server employ quick SSD drives which will boost the speed of your Internet sites noticeably. The hard disks function in RAID to make sure that you will not lose any information because of a power loss or a hardware breakdown. The production servers employ a variety of drives where the information is kept and one disk is used for parity i.e. one bit is added to all of the data copied on it, which makes it much easier to restore the website content without any loss in the event a main drive fails. In case you pick our backup service, your info will be saved on an independent machine that uses standard hard-disk drives and though there's no parity one in this case, they are also in a RAID to guarantee that we will have a backup copy of your content all the time. With this particular setup your information will always be safe because it will be available on several drives.