RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use multiple hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working effectively until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops working, the system could switch to a different one promptly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.