RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. This kind of a configuration has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive stops working, the information will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types based on what amount of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both performed from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

The hard disks that we use for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the traditional HDDs, but high-speed NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup developed for the ZFS file system which we work with. Any content that you add to your cloud website hosting account will be held on multiple hard drives and at least one of them shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the information will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done so as to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content that you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one right away without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to validate the integrity of each and every file.