RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to use a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two key advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive stops working, the data will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among a number of drives. There're different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed 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. Depending on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage function in RAID-Z. This kind of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system that runs on the platform and it employs the so-called parity disk - a special drive where data saved on the other drives is cloned with an extra bit added to it. In case one of the disks fails, your websites will continue working from the other ones and once we replace the bad one, the info which will be cloned on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the info from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every single file adequately and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information that you upload to your shared web hosting account together with the ZFS file system that compares a unique digital fingerprint for each file on all of the drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be held on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used 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 information that is copied to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID breaks down as the website content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one immediately without service interruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.