Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is the fact that they all function as a single unit where your information is stored. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives is identical all of the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be available on the other drives. The general performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different kinds of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance can vary according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all drives in real time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

All the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which work 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 protection for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is saved on several disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be saved on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information that is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site 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 the fact that even if a disk drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.