RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both performed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on a number 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 some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned 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 because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the data that is being duplicated is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your info as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.