Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on several hard disks concurrently. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the hard drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is that they all function as one single unit where data is saved. The key advantage of using a RAID is redundancy as the info on all the drives shall be exactly the same all of the time, so even in the event that a drive fails for some reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The general performance is enhanced as well since the reading and writing processes can be split between various drives, so a single one won't be overloaded. There're different kinds of RAIDs where the effectiveness and fault tolerance could differ according to the specific setup - whether your data is written on all the drives in real time or it is written on a single drive and then mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etcetera.

RAID in Shared Website Hosting

The hard drives which we use for storage with our ground-breaking cloud hosting platform are not the classic HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They operate in RAID-Z - a special setup designed for the ZFS file system that we work with. All the content that you upload to the shared website hosting account will be kept on multiple hard disks and at least 1 shall be used as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where a further bit is added to any content copied on it. In case a disk in the RAID stops functioning, it will be replaced without service interruptions and the information will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits using the data on the parity disk plus that on the remaining disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the information and together with the real-time checksum authentication that the ZFS file system executes on all drives, you won't ever have to be concerned about losing any information no matter what.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers

The info uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is stored on SSD drives that operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - whenever data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk happens to be problematic, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites as the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a brand new drive is included, the information that will be duplicated on it will be a combination between the info on the parity disk and data kept on the other hard drives in the RAID. This is done in order to guarantee that the information which is being copied is accurate, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the various drives to be able to avoid any chance of silent data corruption.