RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on multiple hard disks that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case one drive is divided into separate ones using virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same info is saved on all the drives and the basic benefit of employing this type 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 a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID depending on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the info is synced between the drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All of these factors mean that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types could differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. This configuration 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 site content on top of the real-time checksum authentication which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will never be interrupted and it'll continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an additional bit is added. If a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a combination between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. This is done in order to ensure that the data which is being cloned is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information as the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform compares a special checksum of all of the copies of your files on the various drives so as to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.