RAID, which is short for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all the drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to keep data - the first is redundancy, so in the event that one drive fails, the data will be accessible from the remaining ones, and the second one is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There're different RAID types based on how many drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, etcetera. According to the particular setup, the fault tolerance and the performance could differ.

RAID in Cloud Website Hosting

All of the content which you upload to your new cloud website hosting account will be placed on quick SSD drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your content on top of the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on a couple of disks and at least one of them is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so if any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue functioning flawlessly until the malfunctioning drive is replaced and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is stored on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - each time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the work of the Internet sites since the data will load from the remaining drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data saved on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done to ensure that the info which is being cloned is accurate, so as soon as the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more warranty for the integrity of your information since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a special checksum of all copies of the files on the different drives to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.