Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of storing content on several hard disk drives at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware based on the HDDs which are used - physical or logical ones, yet what is common between them is that they all operate as one single unit where information is stored. The biggest advantage of using a RAID is redundancy because the information on all the drives is identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for whatever reason, the info will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will never be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance could differ depending on the exact setup - whether your data is written on all drives real-time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

RAID in Cloud Web Hosting

Our advanced cloud hosting platform where all cloud web hosting accounts are generated employs quick SSD drives as opposed to the standard HDDs, and they function in RAID-Z. With this setup, a number of hard disk drives work together and at least 1 is a dedicated parity disk. Simply put, when data is written on the remaining drives, it is cloned on the parity one adding an extra bit. This is carried out for redundancy as even if a drive fails or falls out of the RAID for whatever reason, the info can be rebuilt and verified thanks to the parity disk and the data stored on the other ones, thus nothing will be lost and there will be no service disorders. This is one more level of protection for your info together with the state-of-the-art ZFS file system that uses checksums to make sure that all data on our servers is intact and is not silently corrupted.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you host your sites within a semi-dedicated hosting account from our company, all the content you upload will be held on SSD drives that work in RAID-Z. With this type of RAID, at least 1 of the hard disks is employed for parity - when data is synced between the disks, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to ensure the integrity of the data which is copied to a brand new drive in the event that one of the hard drives in the RAID fails because the website content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the info on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is that even if a hard drive fails, the system can easily switch to another one right away without service disruptions of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content which you upload on our cloud Internet hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums in order to verify the integrity of every single file.