RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This kind of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using just a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive doesn't work, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both executed from all of the drives simultaneously, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. Determined by the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new cloud web hosting account will be held on fast NVMe drives that work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds one more level of protection for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it'll continue functioning effectively until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is saved on NVMe drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in such a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the operation of the Internet sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the info that will be copied on it will be a combination between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being cloned is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your data because the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of the files on the various drives in order to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.