Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard disks concurrently. A RAID can be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where info is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the data on all drives shall be the same all the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the remaining drives. The general performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The NVMe drives that our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is designed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where data located on the other drives is cloned with an additional bit added to it. If one of the disks stops functioning, your websites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data that will be copied on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the other drives along with the info from the parity disk. This is performed so as to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to verify the integrity of the info cloned on the new drive. This is an additional level of security for the information which you upload to your shared hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each file on all the hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content that you upload will be kept on NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least 1 of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails since the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive stops working, the system can easily switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.