RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which allows a system to take advantage of several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are used, whether reading and writing are both done from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses quick NVMe drives instead of the classic HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard drives work together and at least a single one is a dedicated parity disk. Put simply, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if some 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 stored on the other ones, therefore absolutely nothing will be lost and there will not be any service disorders. This is an additional level of protection for your info in addition to the state-of-the-art ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the information that will be duplicated on it is a combination of the data on the remaining hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be working normally since RAID-Z allows for a whole drive to fail without any service interruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever have to worry about the integrity of your files.