RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to use several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives concurrently, whether 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 particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue functioning flawlessly until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info which will be copied on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the information that is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.