Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disk drives concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all function as just a single unit where data is kept. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy since the information on all of the drives is identical at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes will be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary based on the specific setup - whether information is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this particular disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the information is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally as RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.

RAID in VPS Servers

All VPS server accounts that we provide are made on physical servers which use SSD drives working in RAID. At least 1 drive is employed for parity - one extra bit is added to the data duplicated on it and in case a main disk breaks down, this bit makes it simpler to recalculate the bits of the files on the failed disk drive so that the right information is restored on the new drive included in the RAID. In the mean time, your sites will still be online because all the information will still load from at least one more hard disk. In case you add regular backups to your VPS package, a copy of your info will be saved on standard disk drives that also operate in RAID because we want to make sure that any sort of content you add will be safe and sound all the time. Using multiple drives in RAID for all of the main and backup servers permits us to offer fast and reliable hosting service.