RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard drives that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into different ones using virtualization software. In either case, identical information is kept on all of the drives and the key advantage of employing this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also enhances the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors indicate that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on 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 faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the websites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the data that will be cloned on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the data which is being copied is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.