RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of 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 info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both executed from all 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 so on. Determined by the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Website Hosting

All content which you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is changed, the information which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your Internet sites will be working normally because RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.