RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for saving data on a number hard drives which operate together as one logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one single drive is split into different ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same data is stored on all of the drives and the key benefit of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the remaining ones. Employing a RAID also improves the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among several drives. There are several kinds of RAID depending on how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synchronized between the hard drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors show that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the various RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are created uses super fast NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, numerous hard disks function together and at least one of them is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, thus absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disturbances. This is another level of security for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info which is cloned to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in case a disk drive stops functioning, the system can switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of each file.