RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types depending on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all drives concurrently, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all website hosting accounts are generated uses quick SSD drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives operate together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there will be no service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info together with the cutting-edge ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The SSD drives which we use on the machines where we create virtual private servers operate in RAID to ensure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least one drive is employed for parity - one bit of info is added to any data copied on it. In the event that a main drive breaks down, it is changed and the information that will be duplicated on it is calculated between the rest of the drives and the parity one. This is done to ensure that the right information is copied and that not a single file is corrupted as the new drive will be included in the RAID afterwards. Also, we use hard disk drives operating in RAID on the backup servers, so in case you add this upgrade to your VPS plan, you'll use an even more reliable web hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives irrespective of any sort of sudden hardware failure.