Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on a number of hard drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware based on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what’s common between them is the fact that they all operate as a single unit where information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives will be exactly the same at all times, so even if one of the drives fails for some reason, the information will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary according to the particular setup - whether data is written on all drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Website Hosting

The drives which we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All of the content that you add to your website hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least 1 will 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 stops functioning, it will be changed without service disturbances and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about 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, all the content that you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID breaks down as the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a hard drive fails, the system can switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each file.