RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which enables a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. You can find different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops functioning for whatever 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 functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working flawlessly until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the information that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops working as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one immediately without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to validate the integrity of each file.