Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard drives concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the HDDs that are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is the fact that they all perform as just one single unit where info is kept. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy since the information on all drives shall be identical at all times, so even in case one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The overall performance is also better since the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance can vary based on the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but quick solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All of the content that you upload to your shared web hosting account will be saved on multiple hard disks and at least one will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is included to any content copied on it. In the event that a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be replaced with no service disruptions and the info will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the other disks. This is done in order to guarantee the integrity of the info and together with the real-time checksum validation which the ZFS file system runs on all drives, you won't ever have to worry about losing any info no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we use for the cloud Internet hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is known as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is cloned on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and in the event that a faulty disk is replaced, the data which will be cloned on it is a mix of the data on the other 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 working normally because RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without causing any service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Using RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that no data will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.