RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which makes it possible for a system to employ several hard drives as one single logical unit. To put it differently, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is identical. Such a setup has two huge advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive stops working, the data will be accessed through the others, and the second is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. You can find different RAID types in accordance with how many drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives simultaneously, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. Depending on the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may differ.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses quick SSD drives instead of the standard HDDs, and they operate in RAID-Z. With this setup, numerous hard disk drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. In simple terms, when data is written on the rest of the drives, it's duplicated on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even in case a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of security for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type which we use for the cloud hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will 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. In simple terms, whenever any data is cloned on this particular drive, one more bit is added to it and if a malfunctioning disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to guarantee that your data is intact. During this process, your websites will be up and running normally as RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without any service disruptions and it simply works by using one of the other ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data shall get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't need to worry about the integrity of your files.