RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on a number hard disk drives that function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case a single drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, the very same data is kept on all the drives and the basic advantage of employing this type of a setup is that if a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all 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 it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new shared web hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ 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 that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning effectively until the faulty drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk turns out to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the websites because the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done so as to ensure that the info that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.