Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on several hard drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where information is saved. The top advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives will be exactly the same all of the time, so even if some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives that work 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 security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a number of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored 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 operating effectively until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is kept on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is included, the data which will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure 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 an extra warranty for the integrity of your information because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the different drives to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.