RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on several hard disk drives which operate together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be saved on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synced 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 type of a configuration is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the info which will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.