RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on multiple hard disks which function together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is split into separate ones through virtualization software. In any case, the same info is kept on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types can differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

Any content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration 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 website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a number of disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the brand 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 case a disk drive fails, the system could switch to another one promptly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each file.