RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a technology of saving data on a number hard disk drives that function together as one single logical unit. The drives can be physical or logical i.e. in the second case a single drive is split into independent ones through virtualization software. Either way, the very same info is stored on all drives and the key advantage of employing such a setup is that in the event that a drive stops working, the data will still be available on the remaining ones. Using a RAID also enhances the overall performance since the input and output operations will be spread among a couple of drives. There are several types of RAID dependant upon how many hard drives are used, whether writing is carried out on all the drives in real time or just on one, and how the information is synchronized between the drives - whether it's written in blocks on one drive after another or all of it is mirrored from one on the others. These factors suggest that the error tolerance as well as the performance between the different RAID types may differ.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
All of the content which you upload to your new shared website hosting account will be held on quick NVMe drives that function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to employ the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of security for your website content on top of the real-time checksum validation which ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is stored on several disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever data is recorded on it, an additional bit is added, so in the event that any drive fails for some reason, the stability of the info can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is kept on the production hard disks and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the operation of our system will not be interrupted and it will continue working efficiently until the problematic drive is replaced and the data is synchronized on it.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your Internet sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content you upload will be held on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this form of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the information which is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the drives in the RAID fails as the site content being copied on the 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 in case a hard drive fails, the system could switch to another one instantly without service interruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of safety for the content that you upload on our cloud hosting platform in addition to the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.