RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use many hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all the drives concurrently, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where info located on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks fails, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is done so as to be able to recalculate the elements of every file properly and to verify the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info which you upload to your shared website hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all of the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is called RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is duplicated on this specific drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be duplicated on it is a mix of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the data is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without any service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.