RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a configuration has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both handled from all of 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, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud Internet hosting platform employs for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is created to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is duplicated with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks fails, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the problematic one, the information that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives together with the data from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every single file correctly and to verify the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the info you upload to your shared hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all the disk drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content that you upload will be held on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID breaks down because the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.