RAID, which stands short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that makes it possible for a system to use several hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all of the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is identical. This type of a configuration has 2 key advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the info will be accessed from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among several drives. There are different RAID types depending on how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both executed from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etc. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new web hosting account will be held on fast SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive fails for some reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is stored on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning smoothly until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account shall be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is used as a parity drive. In simple terms, whenever any kind of data is copied on this particular hard drive, one more bit is added to it and in the event that a problematic disk is replaced, the information that will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to make sure that the info is intact. During this process, your sites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z enables an entire drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to ensure that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will not have to worry about the integrity of your files.