Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all operate as just a single unit where information is kept. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives is exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the info will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different types of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard disks that we employ for storage with our revolutionary cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but high-speed solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to the shared web hosting account will be saved on multiple disk drives and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a special drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without service disruptions and the info will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done to ensure the integrity of the information and along with the real-time checksum verification which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you host your websites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all the content which you upload will be stored on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an extra bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a brand new drive if one of the drives in the RAID stops functioning because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a disk drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one promptly without service interruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of protection for the content you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each and every file.