RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of a number of hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all drives are used as one and the info on all of them is identical. This type of a setup has 2 huge advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive fails, the info will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be distributed among multiple drives. There are different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are used, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses fast NVMe drives as an alternative to the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, multiple hard disk drives operate together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Basically, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even in case some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the information can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data saved on the other ones, so absolutely nothing will be lost and there won't be any service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your data in addition to the advanced ZFS file system which uses checksums to ensure that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The RAID type which we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is 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 duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a malfunctioning disk is changed, the information that will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard disks in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that the info is intact. During this process, your Internet sites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply uses 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 can get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't ever need to worry about the integrity of your files.