RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of keeping data on a number hard disks that work together as one single logical unit. The drives could be physical or logical i.e. in the aforementioned case one single drive is split into independent ones via virtualization software. In either case, exactly the same data is stored on all drives and the basic benefit of using this kind of a setup is that if a drive breaks down, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also boosts the performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several kinds of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is carried out on all drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it's recorded in blocks on one drive after another or it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors imply that the error tolerance and the performance between the various RAID types could differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

Any content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be held on quick SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. This setup is built to work with the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content in addition to the real-time checksum verification which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an additional bit is added, so if any drive stops functioning for whatever reason, the integrity of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it'll continue functioning efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites in a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all of the content that you upload will be kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The reasoning behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the info that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is that even in case a hard drive stops functioning, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform together with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums as a way to authenticate the integrity of every single file.