RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with the number of 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 many others. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. Any content that you add to your shared web hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it'll be changed without service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever need to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, any content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID stops working since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one immediately without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.