Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where your information is stored. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all the drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance may vary based on the particular setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Web Hosting

The SSD drives that our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage operate in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a specific drive where information located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and after we replace the problematic one, the data which will be duplicated on it will be recovered from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the info from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the bits of every file adequately and to validate the integrity of the data cloned on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your web hosting account along with the ZFS file system that analyzes a unique digital fingerprint for each and every file on all hard drives in real time.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

In case you host your Internet sites in a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all of the content which you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning as the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a disk drive stops working, the system could switch to another one right away without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each and every file.