RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for storing data on a number hard drives that work together as a single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one drive is divided into independent ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same information is kept on all drives and the basic advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data shall still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are several kinds of RAID dependant upon how many drives are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors imply that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Website Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new website hosting account will be placed on quick NVMe drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds one more level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the stability of the info 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'll continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is named 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 kind of data is copied on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining disk drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your information is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without causing any service disturbances and it simply uses one of the other ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not need to worry about the integrity of your files.