RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology for keeping data on several hard drives which function together as a single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the latter case one drive is divided into separate ones through virtualization software. Either way, exactly the same info is kept on all drives and the key advantage of using this type of a setup is that in case a drive stops working, the data will remain available on the other ones. Having a RAID also improves the overall performance as the input and output operations will be spread among a few drives. There are several types of RAID based on how many hard disks are used, whether writing is done on all the drives in real time or just on a single one, and how the data is synced between the hard drives - whether it is recorded in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors show that the fault tolerance and the performance between the different RAID types may differ.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This configuration is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is stored on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever info is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for some reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits in accordance with what is saved on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue operating flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the info is synced on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated server account will be created is named RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least one of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Put simply, whenever any kind of data is copied on this special disk drive, one more bit is added to it and if a problematic disk is replaced, the data that will be copied on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that your information is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally as RAID-Z makes it possible for an entire drive to fail without service interruptions and it simply uses one of the remaining ones as the main production drive. Employing RAID-Z together with the ZFS file system that uses checksums to warrant that no data can get silently corrupted on our servers, you'll never have to worry about the integrity of your files.