RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology which permits a system to take advantage of multiple hard drives as a single logical unit. Simply put, all the drives are used as one and the info on all of them is the same. This type of a configuration has two major advantages over using just a single drive to keep data - the first one is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible from the others, and the second one is improved performance as the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. You can find different RAID types depending on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both done from all the drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. According to the exact setup, the fault tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Shared Web Hosting

Our state-of-the-art cloud web hosting platform where all shared web hosting accounts are created employs fast NVMe drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they work in RAID-Z. With this configuration, a number of hard drives function together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is done for redundancy as even if some drive fails or falls out of the RAID for some reason, the data can be rebuilt and verified using the parity disk and the data recorded on the other ones, thus not a thing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is an additional level of security for your info together with the revolutionary ZFS file system which uses checksums to make sure that all the data on our servers is undamaged and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a setup is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without interrupting the work of the sites as 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 mix between the information on the parity disk and data kept on the other drives in the RAID. That is done in order to ensure that the info that is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it can be integrated into the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.