Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is that they all perform as just one single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all of the drives is the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve because the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance can vary based on the specific setup - whether info is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 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 some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this particular drive, one more bit is included to it and in case a faulty disk is replaced, the information which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that the information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z allows for an entire drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.