RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of storing data on multiple hard disks that function together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into individual ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same information is saved on all drives and the main advantage of employing this type of a setup is that in the event that a drive breaks down, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance because the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Hosting

All content that you upload to your new hosting account will be saved on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is duplicated on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and in case a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables an entire 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 guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.