RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the info will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the 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, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but quick NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you add to the shared hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never have to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to validate the integrity of each and every file.