RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a configuration has two key advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive breaks down, the info will be accessed from the others, and the second 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 the number of drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives which work 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 security for your website 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 saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue operating flawlessly until the faulty drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be held on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID breaks down since the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive fails, the system could switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an additional level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.