RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on multiple hard disk drives that work together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into different ones via virtualization software. Either way, the same data is stored on all drives and the main advantage of employing such a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The drives that we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud Internet hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you upload to your shared website hosting account will be saved on multiple hard drives and at least 1 shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an extra bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all 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 hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down because the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system could switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.