Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all work as a single unit where your information is kept. The biggest advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the info on all of the drives shall be identical all the time, so even in the event that one of the drives fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the rest of the drives. The overall performance is enhanced as well as the reading and writing processes will be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary according to the specific setup - whether data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Web Hosting

All of the content that you upload to your new web hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum verification that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info is stored on several disks and at least one is a parity disk - whenever info is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for whatever reason, the integrity of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the problematic drive is changed and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account shall be created is known as RAID-Z. What's different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special drive, one more bit is included to it and if a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be copied on it is a mix of the data on the remaining hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. This is done to ensure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your websites will be functioning normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disturbances and it simply works by using one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system which uses checksums to warrant that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you will never have to worry about the integrity of your files.