RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on several hard disk drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is split into individual ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical information is kept on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type of a setup is that in case a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the remaining ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on quick NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the stability of the info 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 not be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, 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 cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning because the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information 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 disk drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each and every file.