RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that permits a system to use many hard drives as one single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This kind of a setup has 2 major advantages over using just a single drive to store data - the first one is redundancy, so in case one drive fails, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is improved performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among a number of drives. There are different RAID types based on what number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all of 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, etc. Based on the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Hosting
Any content that you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud hosting platform and it adds an additional level of security for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to ensure the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the info 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 case any drive stops functioning for some reason, the stability of the data can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system won't be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the faulty drive is changed and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
The RAID type that we employ for the cloud web hosting platform where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created is referred to as RAID-Z. What is different about it is that at least 1 of the disks is employed as a parity drive. Simply put, whenever any kind of data is duplicated on this special hard drive, one more bit is included to it and if a defective disk is replaced, the info which will be cloned on it is a combination of the data on the other hard drives in the RAID and that on the parity one. We do this to make sure that your data is intact. Throughout this process, your sites will be working normally since RAID-Z enables a whole drive to fail without service disruptions and it simply works by using 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 will get silently corrupted on our servers, you won't have to worry about the integrity of your files.