RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to employ multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The advanced cloud Internet hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are made employs fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, several hard disks function together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your info together with the top-notch ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is cloned to a brand new drive in the event that one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops working, the system can switch to another one right away without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.