Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of saving content on a number of hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives which are used - physical or logical ones, however what is common between them is that they all work as just one single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives is exactly the same at all times, so even in the event that some drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance is also enhanced as the reading and writing processes can be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the functionality and fault tolerance could differ according to the exact setup - whether info is written on all drives real-time or it's written on a single drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and so on.

RAID in Shared Hosting

Our revolutionary cloud web hosting platform where all shared hosting accounts are created uses super fast SSD drives rather than the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives function together and at least one is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it's copied on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is performed for redundancy as even if a 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 saved on the other ones, therefore practically nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is another level of security for your data in addition to the top-notch ZFS file system that uses checksums to guarantee that all of the data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

In case you host your websites within a semi-dedicated server account from our company, all of the content that you upload will be saved on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is employed for parity - when data is synced between the hard drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is duplicated to a brand new drive if one of the disks in the RAID fails since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard disk drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive fails, the system can switch to another one instantly without service disruptions of any kind. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content which you upload on our cloud web hosting platform together with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of each file.