RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types depending on the number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both handled from all of the 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. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The disk drives that we employ for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you upload to your shared web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be changed without service disruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you will never have to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your websites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.