Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of keeping content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, however what’s common between them is that they all operate as just a single unit where information is saved. The key advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives will be exactly the same all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be available on the rest of the drives. The overall performance will also improve since the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance can vary according to the specific setup - whether info is written on all the drives real-time or it is written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, the number of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The hard disks which we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but super fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup intended for the ZFS file system that we employ. Any content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be held on multiple hard disks and at least 1 will be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is included to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops working, it'll be replaced without service disruptions and the data will be recovered on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the data and along with the real-time checksum validation that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you will never have to worry about losing any data no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be flawed, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the functioning of the Internet sites since the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is included, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a blend between the data on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the info which is being copied is accurate, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it can be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an extra guarantee for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all of the copies of the files on the different drives so as to avoid any possibility of silent data corruption.