Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the rest of the drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes can be split between a number of drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance could differ depending on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but fast NVMes. They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. All the content that you upload to the shared web hosting account will be stored on multiple drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an extra bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it will be replaced without service disturbances and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done to guarantee the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you will never need to be concerned about the loss of any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is duplicated to a new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disturbances of any kind. RAID-Z adds one more level of security for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums to verify the integrity of each and every file.