Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of storing content on several hard disks simultaneously. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, still what is common between them is the fact that they all function as just a single unit where info is saved. The main advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the information on all of the drives is the same all of the time, so even if one of the drives fails for whatever reason, the data will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes will be split between a number of drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may differ according to the exact setup - whether information is written on all of the drives in real time or it's written on one drive and afterwards mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new shared hosting account will be placed on fast NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum authentication that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the information is saved on a number of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in the event that any drive stops working for whatever 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 functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the malfunctioning drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our firm, all the content which you upload will be kept on NVMe drives which operate in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least one of the hard disks is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the hard drives, an extra bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is copied to a new drive if one of the hard drives in the RAID stops functioning since the content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the data on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops working, the system can switch to a different one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an additional level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums so as to authenticate the integrity of each and every file.