RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on several hard disks which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case a single drive is divided into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, the same info is stored on all the drives and the basic advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick NVMes. They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we employ. All of the content that you add to your web hosting account will be kept on multiple disk drives and at least one of them will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never have to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your Internet sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is used for parity - when data is synced between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails since the website content being copied on the brand 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 hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to another one quickly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to validate the integrity of each file.