RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to use a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the information will be accessed through the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There are different RAID types based on how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both handled from all the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Based on the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks which we employ for storage with our innovative cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They work in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we use. All the content that you upload to the shared web hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least one shall be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service disruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the data and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you'll never need to worry about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - every time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand 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 drives in the RAID. This is done so as to guarantee that the data which is being duplicated is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data as the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.