RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee 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 info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - every time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the websites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the data that is being copied is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.