RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on several hard drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one single drive is divided into different ones using virtualization software. In any case, exactly the same data is stored on all drives and the basic advantage of using this kind of a setup is that in case a drive fails, the data will remain available on the other ones. Using a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types may vary.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be stored on fast SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored 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 functioning effectively until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. If a disk happens to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the Internet sites as the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a brand new drive is added, the info which will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data saved on the other drives in the RAID. That is done so as to guarantee that the data that is being duplicated is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional guarantee for the integrity of your info because the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.