RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disks which work together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is split into individual ones via virtualization software. In any case, the same information is kept on all drives and the main benefit of employing such a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the other ones. Employing a RAID also boosts the performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is performed on all of the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. All these factors mean that the fault tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

The drives which we employ for storage with our top-notch cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system which we use. All of the content that you add to your shared hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one of them shall be used as a parity disk. This is a special drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be changed without any service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever need to concern yourself with the loss of any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is used as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this specific drive, one more bit is included to it and if a problematic disk is changed, the info which will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to make sure that your info is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disturbances 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 which uses checksums to ensure that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never need to worry about the integrity of your files.