RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that allows a system to employ a number of hard drives as one single logical unit. Put simply, all the drives are used as one and the information on all of them is the same. This type of a setup has two major advantages over using a single drive to store data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessed from the others, and the second one is improved performance since the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among several drives. There're different RAID types in accordance with the number of drives are employed, if reading and writing are both performed from all of the drives at the same time, whether data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and many others. Based on the particular setup, the error tolerance and the performance vary.
RAID in Shared Website Hosting
The hard drives that we use for storage with our state-of-the-art cloud hosting platform are not the standard HDDs, but extremely fast solid-state drives (SSD). They function in RAID-Z - a special setup created for the ZFS file system which we employ. All of the content that you add to the shared website hosting account will be stored on multiple hard disks and at least one of them will be employed as a parity disk. This is a specific drive where an additional bit is added to any content copied on it. If a disk in the RAID fails, it'll be changed without any service interruptions and the data will be rebuilt on the new drive by recalculating its bits thanks to the data on the parity disk along with that on the other disks. This is done in order to ensure the integrity of the info and along with the real-time checksum authentication which the ZFS file system performs on all drives, you'll never need to worry about the loss of any data no matter what.
RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting
In case you host your sites inside a semi-dedicated hosting account from our firm, any content you upload will be stored on SSD 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 synced between the drives, an additional bit is included in it on the parity one. The purpose behind this is to ensure the integrity of the info that is copied to a brand new drive in case one of the disks in the RAID stops working since the site content being copied on the new disk is recalculated from the information on the standard drives and on the parity one. An additional advantage of RAID-Z is the fact that even if a drive stops functioning, the system can easily switch to a different one promptly without service disturbances of any sort. RAID-Z adds one more level of safety for the content you upload on our cloud web hosting platform along with the ZFS file system which uses unique checksums so as to verify the integrity of each and every file.