RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Put simply, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among different drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance vary.

RAID in Web Hosting

All the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the data is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The NVMe drives that are used for holding any website content uploaded to the semi-dedicated hosting accounts that we offer operate in RAID-Z. This is a specific configuration where one or more disk drives are used for parity i.e. the system will include an additional bit to any data duplicated on this type of a disk drive. In case that a disk fails and is substituted with a new one, what info will be duplicated on the latter shall be a mix calculated between the data on the other drives and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that the data on the new drive will be accurate. During the process, the RAID will continue operating normally and the problematic drive will not affect the adequate operation of your websites at all. Working with NVMes in RAID-Z is an outstanding addition to the ZFS file system which runs on our top-notch cloud platform in terms of preserving the integrity of your files because ZFS uses special digital identifiers called checksums to prevent silent data corruption.