Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a way of saving content on multiple hard disk drives simultaneously. A RAID could be software or hardware depending on the drives which are used - physical or logical ones, still what’s common between them is that they all work as one single unit where your information is kept. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy as the data on all the drives is identical all the time, so even in case a drive fails for some reason, the data will still be present on the remaining drives. The general performance will also improve as the reading and writing processes could be split between different drives, so a single one will not be overloaded. There are different sorts of RAIDs where the performance and fault tolerance may vary depending on the specific setup - whether your data is written on all of the drives in real time or it is written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what amount of drives are used for the RAID, and many others.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The NVMe drives which our cutting-edge cloud web hosting platform employs for storage function in RAID-Z. This sort of RAID is developed to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it takes advantage of the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info located on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In case one of the disks stops functioning, your sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the data which will be copied on it will be recovered from what is stored on the rest of the drives together with the information from the parity disk. This is done in order to be able to recalculate the elements of every file correctly and to authenticate the integrity of the data copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the info which you upload to your shared website hosting account along with the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated server account from our company, any content which you upload will be stored on NVMe drives which work in RAID-Z. With this kind of RAID, at least one of the hard drives is used for parity - when data is synchronized between the drives, an additional bit is added to it on the parity one. The idea behind this is to guarantee the integrity of the data that is cloned to a new drive in the event that one of the disks in the RAID fails because the site content being copied on the brand new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard hard drives and on the parity one. Another advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even in the event that a drive fails, the system can switch to a different one quickly without service disruptions of any type. RAID-Z adds an extra level of security for the content you upload on our cloud hosting platform along with the ZFS file system that uses unique checksums as a way to verify the integrity of every single file.