Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on a number of hard drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is that they all function as one single unit where your information is kept. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the info on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even if some drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between multiple drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be stored on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue functioning smoothly until the faulty drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this specific disk drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is changed, the information which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to guarantee that your information is intact. During this process, your websites will be functioning normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.